About Initiatives

Although Initiatives are at the lowest level of the strategy hierarchy, they are important because they provide data at the day-to-day level, enabling your organization to monitor how effectively your organization’s employees perform the tracked processes and procedures.

Creating and managing Initiatives is more complex than working with Perspectives and Objectives. Note the following about Initiatives:

• Unlike Perspectives and Objectives, the system administrator does not usually create or manage Initiatives; they are created and managed by people with special user roles. These roles grant creation, review, edit, and approval permissions at various stages of the Initiative life cycle.
• Each Initiative is associated with only one Objective.
• Each Initiative has its own plan file page, to which you can attach documents if you have the permissions to do so.
• Although Initiatives do not have begin and end dates, their milestones and measures do. The time frame for milestones and measures should match or fall within the Period Begin and Period End dates of the Objective to which the Initiative is associated.
• Measures Data collectors used to determine the number, amount, percentage, or some other defined unit, including performance status, of the items to which they are applied. Measures are applied to Perspectives, Objectives, and Initiatives. assigned to Initiatives allow you to gather performance and trend data.
• Initiatives are automatically assigned two milestones to track the beginning and end of the Initiative. You can add additional milestones between these milestones to track the progress of executing the Initiatives in the work environment.
• Initiatives have two kinds of “status” because they have associated milestones: milestone status and measure performance. However, an Initiative’s overall performance is based on its milestone status.
• Initiatives must be approved through the Initiative creation approval process before they can be used in the system.
• When Initiative measure data or milestone status needs updating, the Initiative owner usually does this and processes the changes through the Initiative update approval process.
• The Initiative Status report, available from the Reports menu in the Navigation panel, lists the status of each Initiative included in the report.
• The Cost Reduction Status report, available from the Reports menu in the Navigation panel, displays performance results from Initiatives that have cost-saving measures from the PI-Dollars-Performance Improvement class.
• When Initiatives reach their end of life, they are retired through the Initiative completion process.